Visiting Opel Dakar Team

Visiting Opel Dakar Team

A few weeks ago we sent a mail to the Opel Dakar Team, about a future visit to their garage, and to share some experiences and to ask several technical informations about a real Dakar rally car. They asked some time, because they were on the Silk Way Rally (Moscow – Astrakhan), but the time has come and we had the pleasure to meet with the crew!

the most succesful rally-team in Hungary. Almost 20 years of experience in long range, endurance rally. They were in Africa too, when the Dakar-rally was held in the black continent, and in the past years they always travel to South-America and compete against the greatest drivers and teams. Even tough the competitors has much better financial and technical background, this team mostly finishes in the Top20, and if you think about it, when it is a great achievement if you can finish it, this is an amazing performance. They also won the Pharaoh-rally in 2002, and in 2012 they finished 2nd in the Silk Way Rally!

As soon as we’ve met with engineer and team member Péter Őri we entered their garage and this beauty greeted us…

Because this was the real car under construction and they were in the middle of a serious repair we could see and discuss almost every small detail and minor parts of the car.

Here you can see the Kevlar fuel tank. 500L… any more questions? 🙂

After we finished asking about the car they showed us the spare parts and the “storehouse”. We saw there some very-very exciting mechanical parts and heard some incredible numbers, prices I can’t share with you 🙂 These are for example are the middle components of the differential and a complete gearbox in pieces…

Later we went out to the courtyard where we could meet with their 3 racing rally-trucks. Those help Balázs Szalay’s car in the races.

They are huge… no really, HUGE! Those wheels are almost man-sized! Incredible masterpieces. Attila was thinking about building one of these in 1:3 scale… What dou you think? Should we add this category to the vote page? :p

Let me show you a pretty interesting fact which is a bit off… Holywood came to Budapest last year when they shoot the Die Hard 5 movie with Bruce Willis. The Opel Dakar Team built 4 trucks for the shooting in half year, which is also remarkable! And I mentioned you that the rally-trucks were huge, but this thing, spectacular. 7m long and 3m wide!

Final chapter of our visit was the second garage where they built another car for order, and this car will probably race in the next year Dakar. This is a bit different, this one has a rigid rear axle and some minor modifications were added in order to fullfill the requirements of the client.

They also asked about our project and they really liked it! In this image you can see Péter watching our promo video about the Rewarron. They are opened for a test drive, where they will drive our final prototype car so we really hope this wasn’t the last meet!

Wish them a good luck in the future and a Top10 finish in the 2014 Dakar-rally! Thank you very much for the opportunity guys, keep up the good work!